Mobility disabled individuals usually require full-time caretakers to be present with them to help with daily activities, which can be very expensive in the long run. One approach in addressing this need is to develop a robotic assistant that could help the user perform daily chores that they are unable to perform themselves.
Despite the proliferation of industrial robots in fields such as automotive and semiconductor manufacturing, food processing, and material handling, existing robots largely operate in a teach-and-repeat mode, with limited human interaction. For less structured environments, such as in assistive living, human guidance and intervention is essential.
Current robotic solutions for mobility impaired individuals mostly consist of a single robotic arm mounted on a wheelchair, which limits its usage to simple tasks like ‘pick and place’. However, these arms are usually controlled via a joystick and as a result, are not appropriate for individuals who are paralyzed from the neck down (approx. 5000 per year in US), or have limited use of their hands. Furthermore, adapting existing robots that are controllable via human guidance for mobility impaired individuals are faced with numerous economic and technological hurdles that have yet to be fully addressed by the prior art.
Research work is also being done to develop fully automated robots that can navigate and pick/place objects by themselves. However, these systems only exist in academia and are tailored for specific scenarios or workspace. As such, most such solutions could potentially be useful for mobility impaired individuals are still some ways off of being commercially available and are also very expensive. Accordingly, a need exists for a robotic assistant that can help severely handicapped individuals.